Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel is probably the closest analogue of any film to Interstellar, to the point where their climactic scenes play like mirror images of one another. The connections range from cosmetic to more fundamental. For one thing, both films star Matthew McConaughey. For another, Contact’s recurrence of Occam’s razor as a rhetorical device is pretty easily compared to Interstellar repeatedly evoking “Murphy’s Law.” That both films ultimately hinge on the dimensions-spanning bonds of love between a father and his daughter is no small thing.

Where does it place within the realm of space-travel films? Or Christopher Nolan films, for that matter?

In many ways Interstellar can be seen as a companion piece to Robert Zemeckis’ Contact. Aside from starring Matthew McConaughey and featuring imput from theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, the galaxy-spanning premise of both films is grounded by a seemingly impossible human connection between a daughter and her father.

Posts about Interstellar comparison to 2001: A Space Odyessey written by Three Rows Back

"Over and over in the movie Cooper (played by Matthew McConaghey) says “someone out there is helping us,” but instead of pointing to God who created us for a purpose, the film points to impersonal chance evolution as the hero and the final conclusion is no one is out there and we have to help ourselves."

_________ Jodie Foster's mystical flight Contact Don't read this review if you want to be surprised by the ending of the movie. My next sentence is discussing the end. Over and over in the movie C...

While it’s temptingly easy to cite 2001 (anything invoking a dimensional “star gate” triggers rarely positive Kubrick comparisons), the movie that hangs over Interstellar like the dust cloud atmospherically engulfing its earthbound scenes is Contact, with which it shares much more than just leading man McConaughey. Adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan (with signature input from Interstellar’stheoretical physicist Kip Thorne), Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 epic similarly centred on a daughter crying out to a lost father whose soul seems to abide somewhere across the universe.

Despite a plot full of holes of various kinds, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic remains enthralling and amazing, writes Mark Kermode

There is a film, a science-fiction epic, about an attempt to use wormholes to travel to distant galaxies. A film that deals with issues of science and faith, that’s unapologetic in the way that it supports mankind’s quest to explore the universe. A film that has as its emotional backbone the relationship between a father and a daughter. A film made by one of the most successful directors in the world and costarring Matthew McConaughey. The name of the film? Contact.

Looking back on another space movie that bears some resemblance to 'Interstellar,' 1997's 'Contact.'

Interstellar begins by establishing the strong bond between a father, played by Matthew McConaughey, and his daughter. As I watched, I found myself traveling through a wormhole to a time prior to the McConaissance when an earlier, breezier McConaughey played a pivotal role in a different movie about space travel: 1997’sContact, that also marks its opening beats by establishing the relationship between a daughter and her father.

Though many comparisons have been made between Interstellar and Kubrick’s 2001, I find the comparison to Contact not only delightful because of the McConaughey cross-over, but also suggestive of how radically cinematic and cultural valuations of the cosmos have changed in the almost twenty years since Jodi Foster’s Ellie Arroway took her own interstellar journey. Contact, I should note, was a formative movie in my own coming-of-age story, one that set me on a path first towards becoming an astronomer, but ultimately ending up an anthropologist studying the contemporary culture of astronomy.

What two very different Matthew McConaughey characters in two very different films tell us about our changing attitudes toward space.

Matthew McConaughey has boldly gone where he has been before: a dramatic space movie. In Christopher Nolan's new film Interstellar, McConaughey plays a slightly futuristic pilot, who will hopefully save humanity. In Contact, McConaughey is a Christian philosopher. All right, ...

Let’s take a look at Contact. It’s a flawed film for sure, but its premise is similar with one enormous difference. Ellie Arroway is motivated by love and the loss of her father at a young age, but that love doesn’t preclude difficult choices and a reliance on scientific study to achieve or rethink her goals. In fact McConaughey’s Palmer Joss makes a clear distinction between science, knowledge, and faith. He also makes a compelling argument for both knowledge and faith, and that sometimes we must rely more on one than the other.

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ combines bad storytelling with a laughable premise, and hopes you won’t notice because it looks pretty